Huawei E3231 Dongle from 3
I have just recently purchased this for a project where it was not possible to install wired broadband, particularly as the project is of such short duration (3-4 weeks), so I needed to investigate options for 3G broadband with a reasonable data cost/renewal… from all of the providers I looked at, Three appears to have the best offering for my needs.
I actually don’t intend to use the dongle itself for the project, as we already have a 3G router that the SIM will be inserted into to share the data allowance among a couple of users, however, during the testing of the SIM, and working out the process to purchase more data1 (if necessary), I needed to connect the dongle directly to the PC.
It has been some time since I last used a 3G dongle (well over a year), and things have certainly changed…. gone is the requirement to install a lot of software to a) make the dongle visible to the operating system, and then b) to manage the connection itself… instead this lovely little dongle acts as a USB network adapter, is detected right away, and then any further configuration is done through a web interface – wonderful.
What makes this even better for me, is that I am currently going through a phase of testing some Linux distros as a potential for a full OS replacement (although to be honest, my links with Windows won’t be severed that easily), I am currently trying Elementary OS (more on that later) and this little dongle just plugged in and worked first time!!!!!
Very nice!
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I have previously found that to top-up data allowance with some dongles/providers that I needed to have the SIM in the dongle itself, as it would not let me top-up whilst using the 3G router… that may well have changed now… ↩︎
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